A car related to the fatal shooting on Woodford Street in Portland on is loaded onto a flatbed tow truck as a Portland police officer surveys the ground nearby. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Police on Friday arrested a fourth suspect connected to a fatal shooting in April on Woodford Street in Portland, where a man – in the early morning hours – was pulled from a parked car, beaten and shot in an apparent ambush over drugs.
Jonathan Scott Geisinger, 44, was arrested in South Portland on Friday night on a charge of felony murder in the April 26 shooting of Derald “Darry” Coffin.
Geisinger is being held on $500,000 cash bail in the Cumberland County Jail, police said.
Investigators obtained a warrant for Geisinger’s arrest on Thursday, and at about 5:30 p.m. Friday, they believed they had located him at a home on 53 Briarwood Road in South Portland, Maj. Robert Martin of the Portland police said in a statement. Special reaction teams from the Portland and South Portland police secured the outside of the home while a search warrant was obtained to enter the house and take Geisinger into custody.
Derald “Darry” Coffin Photo courtesy of Terry Leonard
The search was executed just after 7:30 p.m. and he was arrested about an hour later. No other details of the arrest were made available on Saturday.
Geisinger has a lengthy criminal record, according to the Maine State Bureau of Identification, including many arrests for drug-related crimes, as well as arrests for domestic assault, kidnapping and theft, dating from the 1990s to 2021. He has served stints in jail and prison since the late 1990s, according to court records.
Earlier this month, police made three other arrests in the shooting.
Damion Butterfield, 23, of Saco was charged with murder in the death of Coffin, 43, of Bath, and attempted murder of Annabelle Hartnett, 27, who was wounded but survived.
Like Geisinger, Thomas M. MacDonald, 44, of Westbrook and Anthony L. Osborne, 45, of Standish face one count each of felony murder and are being held on $500,000 cash bail.
When the new charges against him were announced this month, Butterfield was already incarcerated at the York County Jail, where he has been since the day after the shooting, on unrelated charges, which include a probation violation.
Hartnett, a witness and victim of the April 26 shooting, told the Portland Press Herald in May that she believes Osborne was responsible for orchestrating an attempted shakedown and the shooting. She said other than Osborne, there were three people who attacked Coffin, which means Geisinger’s arrest could be the final one in the case. Felony murder is a law used to hold people responsible for a homicide that occurred in the course of the commission of another crime, including robbery, even if the defendant did not directly cause the death or pull the trigger.
In the interview last month, Hartnett gave the Press Herald an account of what happened when she and Coffin met up with a man known to her only as “Bear” after midnight on April 26. As she and Coffin drove toward Woodford Street with Bear in the car, she said, Bear begged Hartnett and Coffin to give him 5 grams of heroin to resell from an apartment on Cumberland Avenue.
She and Coffin, she said, told him they had nothing to give him and were struggling themselves. Bear then asked where they were headed – and when Hartnett told him, he made a phone call and gave someone the address. Hartnett has been in and out of recovery for about seven years now, she said, and most recently moved to Portland in May 2020 after a prior stint at a Portland sober house around 2017.
A few moments later, as Coffin, Hartnett and Bear sat smoking cigarettes in Hartnett’s SUV outside the apartment building on Woodford Street where Hartnett and Coffin were staying, three men approached the SUV from behind, pulled Coffin out and beat him. Then one of them shot Coffin twice, Hartnett said. She said Bear, who got out of the SUV and watched the assault, didn’t appear surprised.
Annabelle Hartnett stands on Woodford Street in Portland near where she was shot and her friend Darry Coffin was killed on April 26. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
The gunman then aimed his gun at Hartnett’s head, but the bullet missed her by inches, passing through the brim of her baseball cap and the scarf around her neck. A second round ripped through her upper arm, and she was taken to and treated at Maine Medical Center for her wounds. After Coffin and Hartnett were shot and the gunman fled toward Back Cove, Bear asked Hartnett again to give him drugs before the police arrived.
“He kept saying, ‘Give me anything you guys got, because the cops are gonna be here. If you guys have anything on you, give it to me now,’” Hartnett said in an interview after the shooting. “And I was like, ‘Get away.’”
During the interview last month, Hartnett said she’d learned Bear’s real name was Anthony Osborne.
Osborne was charged with murder once before, in 2000, for the stabbing death of Brandon Feyler, 21, outside Osborne’s apartment on Seavey Street in Westbrook. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served 14 years of a 15-year prison sentence. Since his release, he has had multiple convictions for domestic violence and violating a protective order and faced other low-level charges. He was sentenced to serve 2½ years in prison for felony-level violation of a protection order in 2020, and it’s not clear when he was last released.
Staff writers Matt Byrne and Tim Cebula contributed to this report.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
